Cookies and brownies

19Aug

I’m falling behind on my blogging! I’m still baking, and taking photographs, but my blogging seems to be falling behind. Perhaps it’s because I’m trying new recipes that can’t be found online, and I don’t really have the time to type the recipes in.

Basically my last two baking endeavors were brownies and cookies. Last year Tom bought me a chocolate cookbook, and I haven’t really explored much from it, so I’ve been trying to rectify that. So far, I’ve baked cupcakes, brownies, and cookies from this cookbook, with plans on moving into cakes and perhaps a few more things. We’ll see. The brownies were a bit off. I thought I over baked them, but it turns out that I just had my conversions wrong. Most chocolate bars for baking here are sold in 100g bars. That’s slightly over 3 ounces, so if you need 3 ounces of chocolate, you use most of a bar. If you need 6 oz, you use most of two bars. And so on… So this recipe for brownies called for 6 oz of chocolate. I got my two bars out, and melted the chocolate. Followed the rest of the recipe and baked them. They just were wrong. The next day I realized that the chocolate bars I used were actually 150g of chocolate. Which means the 6 oz. I thought I was putting into the brownies turned out to be more like 8 or 9 oz. With baking, the wrong measurements can really screw up the recipe. Luckily, they still tasted delicious, so we ate them anyway.

Next, I made cookies. I was more careful with the amounts of chocolate this time. I don’t remember the name of the cookies, but they are supposed to kind of look like mountains. Plus you put a bit of chile powder in them, so they are a bit spicy as well. Tom’s a big fan of the spicy cookies. Plus I finally managed to find cacao nibs in the UK! I couldn’t find them for ages, and many recipes in this book call for them. We were at the borough market, and there was a nice chocolate shop, so I ran in and asked. They had them! I bought several so I could try things out with them. The cookies came out marvelously, and I was quite happy with the taste and texture. Tom didn’t sleep well those few nights we had them, and he thinks it might be from the nibs, as he has a bit of a problem with caffeine, and the guy at the shop did warn us about eating too many of them late at night.

Actually I have had it! I absolutely love it. A place we used to go in Santa Cruz had amazing mole! I also found a place in London that does a good job with it as well. I need to find a good recipe to make it at home though…

I also need to blog about the crap I have baked recently, I’ve just been busy!